Well I've been waiting for a warm day to test this one because it stinks under load...just really smells toxic nasty to me...and needed to do it with windows open and fans blowing and today was the day. I'm not gonna bother writing up a full featured review on it...it takes days to do it all up proper and if you're like me you head straight for the test results most of the time anyway...I can do the tests and post results in a matter of hours. Ya'll can criticize my grammar all you want...doesn't matter since she's been dead for decades anyway.

It's an Echostar Black Mirror Edition 680W that I bought for 20 bucks from here:

I got the last one though which is a good thing because they shouldn't even be allowed to sell this crap when it's just going to fail and maybe damage something in the process. The OEM is Leadman...the PCB reads LP-8867 Rev: 1.3. Caps are Cheng LS on the primary and Cheng X Low ESR secondaries. Label shot here:

Innards here:

left to right 12V, 5V and 3.3V output transistors:

and sloppy soldering with residue left pretty much everywhere but it doesn't show well in the photo:

Only the main 20/24-pin cable is sheathed...just 12" to the first connector on all cables which include a 4-pin CPU, a 6-pin PCIe, two SATA's, 6 molex and a FDD.

I did the low load standby tests first since I knew this thing was gonna blow under load at some point:

It fails them all...onto a load test:

You can see the 12V rail dropped hard right off the bat and out of spec at test 3 when the wheels fell off. It failed a few minutes into test 3 with a loud bang and a long zzzzt! sound. It was the longest sounding PSU death I've ever heard and I've blown up a lot of low end crap. Made me wonder what sort of damage it would be doing to components during that length of time...this thing just sucks all around even in death. I hadn't managed to measure all the data yet before it went so that's all the ????? you see. I've assumed missing voltages to be the same as test 2 in order to calculate total load and hence efficiency. Notice there is no thermal fan controller and it just gets about whatever the 12V can output and hence slower as the unit gets hotter...great idea <eyeroll>.

It failed on the primary side...fuse blew and this thang which I'm told is an NTC thermister (current limiter) fried and popped.

and resistors here on the primary side also burnt to a crispy crunch and two pins on the IC to the right of them burnt thru (I think that's the thing that controls the switching):

those are the only two components on the primary heatsink btw

and scorched and burnt on these jumpers on the secondary side where they're connected to ground:

These are the ripple results at 99W load. Top to bottom 12V,5V and 3.3V.

lord god almighty do they even bother with ripple suppression at all or did they design it with extra ripple built in or wtf?. We're talking 6 times over the allowable tolerance at a low 100W load.

Rise time:

I actually did these tests quite some time ago (when I discovered that it stinks and needed to wait for a warm day to test it further). I was torturing it like a cat and a mouse here trying to get some wild rise time sweeps and the load amounts were ~22A on the three major rails for a total load of about 450W. I would shut it off before it had a chance to fail. Most of my readers have seen this shot before:

It would at least sometimes settle down and run for a bit with this load before I shut it down, but not always...about a third of the time it would develop an oscillation that it couldn't stop and eventually shut itself off (beyond the length of the scan seen below).

or about a third of the time it would just fail to even start up period like so.

If this prevents one person from buying this junk then mission accomplished. The people who are most likely to buy an Echostar are the least likely to be able to afford a new computer when this crap ruins what they already had...and good luck even finding a source to RMA this thing through even if it's the only thing that dies.

For once the customer reviews are spot on. It's unfortunate they had to learn their lesson the hard way. How is it that the PSU industry has went so long without any real regulation? Is it such a crime against capitalism to at least set some rules stating that your product should do what it claims to be capable of?

For once the customer reviews are spot on. It's unfortunate they had to learn their lesson the hard way. How is it that the PSU industry has went so long without any real regulation? Is it such a crime against capitalism to at least set some rules stating that your product should do what it claims to be capable of?

yeah these things haven't even passed the UL tests but it's not against the law to sell something that hasn't like it is with the FCC test...maybe that'd be a good place to start to weed out this junk. And the CE mark in Europe, although required to be there, is only a statement by the maker that it complies and not the result of a real safety test either. Although none of that would address the issue of units that won't put out the wattage they claim but it'd be a start to ending this extremely low end junk.